5/21 Is there any decent open source html2pdf converter? I've seen some
that do the reverse, but the only html2pdf are commercial. Thanks.
\_ OpenOffice? Has HTML editor and 1.1 beta can save as pdf.
\_ /usr/local/bin/html2ps $1 | /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf - $2 -crebbs
\_ Perfect, thank you.
\_ Now how about a util to convert a pdf file to a 2up (2 pages per
side, like enscript) pdf?
\_ pdf->ps->psnup->pdf
\_ Thanks.

5/21 What's the best "phone card" to buy in the USA to take to
England and Switzerland for making calls back to the USA?
Where can I buy it in/near Berkeley?
\_ type "phone card" in google and buy online from them
(I used http://nobelcom.com to call MiddleEast). Your get your pin in
email a few minutes after signing up. They actually called me to
verify my oder. order too.
\_ You're probably better off buying a phone card over here if you'll
be calling here. They sell them at any newsstand/kiosk. -John
\_ not everyone knows that you live in Swiss-land. now they do.
\_ I bought an MCI card from Costco for the sole purpose of making
call from overseas. So far the card has worked from Canada,
England, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, and Argentina.
Strangely enough, my wife couldn't make it work from Japan. Of
course, this card is quite a bit pricier than the deals you can
get off the net.

5/21 Is it worth taking someone to small claims court for $150?
More specifically, will it be woth it after all the hassles,
headaches, and fees associated with it?
\_ You can recover fees, so if you win it's just time.
\_ With small claims court, it's all relative. If you've got the time
to spend in court, it's worth it. If not, then it's not.
\_ doesn't that really depend on how much 150 (and getting even) is
worth to you?
\_ Yeah, I don't really care that much about the money. It's
just the principles of the whole thing that I want to get
the bitch back. -OP
\- assuming you are employed, at $150 it is going to be
about the "principle" and not the "principal". one thing
to remember is after you have served the other party,
he too will be facing "is it worth going to SCC for $150"
[unless you up the claim amount], so he may decide to
settle to avoid the hassle. although you may be out the
service costs and such. so what to do sort of depends
on your guess about how the other person will react ...
like the other party might not show up so you win a
default judgement, but you might have still had to prepare
your case. there is a good NOLO book on SCC. --psb
\_ Small claims court doesn't help you collect the claim. It just
rules that you are legally entitled to the money, but that's it.
\_ Yeah but collecting the claim can be fun if you're a bastard
and do things like attach their wages if they have any.
\_ is their a nolo book that covers how to do that? thanks.

5/21 Re: spam filtering. I'm using an older 2.x spamassassin on my
system (pre-bayesian) and by doing nothing other than lowering the
spam limit from 5 points to 2 points I catch 100% of spam and don't
get real mail flagged as spam. Why does everyone go through all this
hassle with newer versions, different filtering techniques, etc and
still get mail mis-filtered? Am I just special or do a lot of you
have friends sending you info about how great viagra is working for
them and their new wife tiffani from russia in the home they got with
a low rate mortgage with money down which they made fast?
\_ Yes, you are special. In my own case, for example, many of my
friends email me from the mainland China and Hong Kong / Taiwan,
which translate that the email is in all sort of encoding.
Further, I got a lot of idoit friends whose email server is on
just about all the black-list there... Simple rules simply doesn't
work. I used to rely on whitelist exclusively to prevent
misfiling. Still need to test out this Bayesian filter thingy.

5/21 Bayer sells medicine that carried high risk of transmitting
AIDS in Asia and Latin America after it stop selling it in
the west. 100 people in Hong Kong and Taiwan got HIV after
using Bayer's medicine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/22BLOO.html
\_ So? Don't those other countries have their own control over drugs
in the marketplace? You know there are drugs approved for use in
Europe that aren't allowed here? They should protect themselves
better and not rely on foreign nations to decide what drugs are
good or bad for their people.
\_ you have no idea what your great country is doing. USA
never reluctant to throw their weight around to sell their
products. if the government is not co-operating... well,
the worse case is what happened to Guatemala, Iran, and
Iraq - government got overthrown by US either conventional
or covert forces.
\_ uhhh, Bayer is german! damn nazi's experimenting again.
\_ So the Great White Satan goes to these countries and says,
"You must accept our poisoned drugs or we'll invade your
country and install a government that will sell our broken
drugs to your citizens"? Stop reading so much
alt.conspiracy.esl.
\_ You've read too many Gibson novels. Perhaps you should
sit down, put a damp towel over your head and take a long
rest.
\_ Hasn't government basically dissapeard in Gibson's
futuristic novels? Is the US government mentioned
even once in the Sprawl series?
\_ any citizens of foreign nation who is politically
conscious know this. These are facts, not fictions.
For most part, USA just throw its economic weight
around, and because USA is the largest export market,
that is usually enough. It's unfortunate for Iran
and Iraq, because oil is too much to gave up.
\_ Iran? You mean that we invaded Iran for their oil?
WTF are you babbling about? You're beneath idiocy.
\_ You know that the US overthrew a democratically
elected leader in Iran and had the Shah installed
in his place in 1953, right?
\_ Could you join us in the current century please? And
as always, it's not nearly as grade school simple as
you'd like to portray history.
\_ Good troll. Lots of bites.
\_ You are moron. -aaron
\_ "You are [a] moron. -aaron" [corrected]
\_ You are fool" -!aaron
\_ I am not aaron - eric

5/22 To people with TCP/IP clue: A friend of mine has a wireless router
at home (D-Link's DI-614+, but there doesn't seem to be much in
the way of useful model-specific docs around of any but the "here's
how you click a button" kind). The thing comes with a built-in
capability for firewalling, "virtual server" (i.e. port forwarding to
a specific LAN machine, set up by port number on the external
interface), etc. At the moment, we can't get traceroute (from local
machines to the outside world) to work whatsoever; it shows the first
hop to the router, and doesn't give anything past that. I've tried
allowing all ICMP&UDP traffic in both directions, but to no avail.
Presumably I don't understand the traceroute mechanism
well enough, and am missing something. Any suggestions?
\_ I had this problem with an SMC router. I have reported this to the
manufacturer. Later, they have come up with a firmware that fixed
this problem. Lots of those home broadband routers have very lousy
TCP/IP implementations, so the problems like this are expected to
pop up all the time.
\_ That's, err, good to know I suppose. I'll try that route,
thanks. -op (other advice still solicited though)
\_ Not an expert, but I believe traceroute is simply a series of pings
with a timeout short but increasing timeout-- so you ping http://yahoo.com,
and router1 responds but router2 does not because the timeout has
elapsed. For the second ping, you increase the timeout so router2
replies but not router3. And so on. Short answer is that your fw
is most likely preventing the ICMP echo from getting back to your
PC.
\_ you're right...you're not an expert.
\_ hello cranky asshole router guy!
\_ CARG does have a point, he indicated that ICMPs are
\_ CARG does have a point, op indicated that ICMPs are
allowed to pass through, which implies that he has more
clue than I thought he did. I just didn't read his post
all the way through and gave him the handwavy traceroute
explanation that wasn't very helpful. -- nae
\_ it's also inaccurate; traceroute is not a series
of pings. -CARG
\_ it is for some m$ implementations, i hear. -op
\_ timeout or ttl (time to live) based on number of hops
\_ That's just the micro$oft "tracert" implementation (or rather,
a distorted account thereof); most others use UDP. But in any
case, see below; this is probably not the problem. -op
\_ The default setting on the router is probably to filter ICMP
echos.
\_ Yes, but I'm fairly certain I put in a firewall rule to allow
all ICMP traffic in both directions. -op
\_ In the Advanced->Filters menu, try setting ICMP type 11 to always
oops, 8 _/
In the Advanced->Firewall menu, set to allow all ICMP types
\_ WHOOPS. Upon noticing the ICMP option missing in the "Filters"
dialog's "protocols" dropdown, I found out I'm several firmware
updates behind. However, the latest firmware update, even though
labelled "fixes traceroute issue" on D-Link's site, still
has no ICMP option there and traceroute is still not working. -op
\- hello has anyone seen the following "traceroute problem":
on a couple of solaris boxes, all of a sudden something
weird happens to the tcpstack and it never sends ICMP Port
UnRchables back to you? So any udp traffic is silently
absorbed if there is no application to fwd it to? ok tnx --psb
\_ Look for your answer on http://broadbandreports.com.

5/22 Outlook question. If I send a piece of e-mail with a 1MB attachment to
100 people in my company using the same Outlook server, does it take up
100MB on the server or does it only take up 1MB? Thanks.
\_ There is no such thing as an "outlook server". Do you mean
a MS Exchange mail server?
\_ Oops, I guess so.
\_ Yes.
\_ I think that's considered one of outlooks major features (not
replicating files for each member of an organization). It's
probably configurable, but most likely you've only got one
copy of the message on the server.

5/21 Is there a way to have Matlab calculate the area contained within
a loop (a P-V loop)? These points are empirical data and thus
aren't able to be related via an equation. Thanks.
\_ Have you tried "polyarea"?

5/21 Man question: what does flushing the urinal while peeing accomplish?
It seems like everybody at my company does, even the young guys
\_ Why flush a urinal at all, except sporadically? It's got a drain
on the bottom anyway, so it's not like the stuff's sitting around.
\_ unflushed unrinals lead to contaminated water being splashed
on your pecker.
\_ Sure it is. You can smell it. Which is part of the reason to
flush afterwards.
\_ Never heard of or seen such a thing. How could you flush a stand
up urinal while still peeing anyway? You don't you touch the thing
with your bare hand, do you? This is what God invented shoes for.
\_ Mine are approximately shoulder level, which inspires careful
scrubbing afterward.
\_ flushing first insures that any splash-back is just your own piss
or water--as opposed to your piss comingled w/ the piss of others.
Personally, I agree w/ the guy who never touches the handle with
his hand... and additionally I only piss in the stalls to further
mitigate the splash-back issue
\_ You probably piss on the seat too. Wanker.
\_ ...and i piss on your keyboard at night when you're not there
making it all pointless.
\_ Your kitchen is probably more contaminated. Germs don't do well
on stainless steel. As long as you wash your hands after
flushing, you don't have to worry about it. Are you one of those
nuts that dries his hands and then uses the paper towel to open
the door (leaving the towel behind)? It's freaks like you that
make the biggest messes.
\_ I do this all the time, but throw the towel in the trash can.
After you see the n-th guy walk out from a stinky stall and
head straight back to work, you'll pick up the habit too.
\_ I do this all the time too, but only after I notice
my manager (male) walk out from the stinky TOILET
back to work w/o washing his hands.
\_ just to mention, pee is sterile unless you have a UTI or kidney
infection. afraid of a little amonia? (I know it SEEMS gross).
\_ The way I avoid splash-back is to aim at the side of the urinal,
so that 1) my piss hits the surface at an angle rather than
perpendicularly, hence reducing splash, and 2) any splash will be
towards the urinal instead of me. See the illustration below.
urinal urinal
_____ _____
| | | |
| | | |
\ |
\ |
me me
No splash. Splash.
It works well on most urinals. It only doesn't work on those
urinals that are very wide and have small side walls. In that
case I control my bladder to not piss with full force.
\_ Here's another alternative:
----
|
urinal | - - - - ---- Sodan
| \
---- "
\
\_ Congratulations. You win the award for most bored sodan.
\_ On a related note. Guys fart while urinating. It must be
some muscle relaxation thing. I told my wife about this and she
seems rather disgusted. Apparently she never farts while urinating.
Is this true of women in general?
\_ It doesn't enter into her consciousness, but she does it.
We all do. Is she a goer? Does she go?
\_ "goer"??? If you're asking if she farts out loud in my
presense, yes she does.
\_ Say no more.
\_ Seconded. Please say no more.
\_ A wink's as good as a nod to a blind bat,
know what I mean, know what I mean?
\_ Release of bladder pressure and relaxing the muscles in the
region has a lot to do with it.
\_ Some people have a tough time letting go, and the sound of
the running water helps them get started.
\- hello, you may wish to see:
http://maddog.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$68
--psb

5/21 [reposting. I'm not the OP, but I found the article informative.
why censor this?]
\_ Hmmm. Boring?
Brian Harvey on NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/technology/circuits/22comp.html
"Computing's Lost Allure"
\_ Because it was boring and had nothing to say? Because it is just
going to be yet another excuse to increase H1b numbers and export
more IT jobs to India and there's nothing you can do about it?
What did you find so informative about it? That kids who thought
getting a CS degree was worth a million dollars like the 19 y/old
idiot quoted in the article are now moving on to other fields where
they won't get a million dollars either?
\_ ignorant fool! all those biotech jobs washing dishes for
35k/year will lead to billions of dollars in stock options
any day now! just you wait.

5/22 So I've used had my Palm IIIxe for almost 3 years. Once, a couple
years back, I lost all data somehow. After almost 3 years of no
problem, my PDA would not turn on this morning. I did a soft reset
and all data was gone. Everything should have been backup up on my
PC (I use BackupBuddy). Well, all of the address book, todo list, etc.
data was saved, but when I did the restore, it also brought back
items that I had deleted months ago. But other data, like from my
shopping list program, password program, etc. hadn't been updated on
my PC in almost a year. A few hours after all this, my PDA lost all
data again. Anyone have any idea what would cause all this or have
any similar experiences or advice?
\_ Battery is probably fucked.
\_ It takes AAA, but I had just replaced the batteries in the
last couple days? Do you think it could really be something
about the batteries? My best guess (though maybe not a very
good one) is that it's due to the heat. I often leave my PDA
in my glove compartment, but the weather was warmer than
usual the day before it choked, not hot, but warmer than
usual, maybe 80. I find it hard to believe this would cause
such problems, but I have no better guess.
\_ does Palm have a small battery to keep its memory? may be
it's that battery went out.
\_ I'll bet it has a 3 year warrantee. You're a 3 years + 1 day.
\_ did you HotSync regularly?
\_ About once a week. So I lost a few days of stuff.
Anyway, I figured out what happened. For some reason,
back in August, BackupBuddy stopped doing it's thing.
Thus, the nonstandard databases were restored to their
state back in August. In this same backup directory
was the PDB files from addressbook, datebook, etc. So, it
also loaded in this outdated standard data (thus the
entries that I deleted months ago were there). Then, it
took the current backup of the standard data (the only
thing actually being backed up since August) and put that
back in my PDA too along with the old stuff. So, it
(almost) all makes sense (to me). I just don't know why
it lost all data in the first place, or why BackupBuddy
stopped doing it's thing. No one else out there uses
BackupBuddy?
\_ Whoa, there, son! What goes on between me and my Backup
Buddy is none of your business!
\_ SARS?